All of us at Planet Waves have been watching the day go by with sadness and apprehension. Today’s New York Times front page felt like it was from the God is Dead edition, but it’s really humanity that’s having problems — problems created by only a few people.
Those who keep an eye on the news woke up Thursday morning to Israel invading the Gaza Strip. This, after weeks of bloody fighting, rockets launched by Hamas at civilian populations in Israel and air attacks on civilians (and supposedly on Hamas leaders) by Israel in Gaza. Then just after 9 am EDT (13:00 UTC), another Malaysian Airlines 777 went down, this time along the border between Russia and Ukraine, over rebel territory, where a made-up war has been brewing for months.
Obviously a military action, it takes some serious artillery to hit a jetliner moving at nearly the speed of sound at 33,000 feet. You cannot do that with any kind of improvised device or old surplus. And it takes some gall to shoot at civilians and in the process kill more than 80 children, none of whom have anything to do with your particular conflict. Tucked at the bottom of the Times’ front page was Microsoft laying off 18,000 employees and General Motors under fire for its decade-long conspiracy to kill its own customers with faulty ignition switches.
The chart for the Malaysian Airlines crash — the second loss of one of their 777s this year, against odds that make the Pick 6 Lotto seem like an easy guess — pretty much tells the story. This happened the first full day of Jupiter in Leo, which is the first full day of Jupiter not in Cancer. Jupiter in Cancer seemed to be providing a protective cover over the worst effects of the cardinal grand cross and the Uranus-Pluto square. While Uranus-Pluto aspects have a reputation for being liberationist, a closer look at our era and also at the 1960s, when we experienced the most recent major contact between them, reveals that reactionary forces take advantage of Uranus-Pluto events efficiently.